El Dorado Project Has Proved Itself, Standard Lithium Says

Robert Mintak, CEO of Standard Lithium Ltd. (Kyle Massey)

Standard Lithium LLC of Vancouver, British Columbia, has proved that its technology can collect lithium from Arkansas’ underground brine and process it into better-than-battery grade lithium carbonate for the lithium-ion market, the company announced Thursday.

With electric vehicles poised to feed an emerging global market, Standard has achieved “start-to-finish proof of concept” for its novel method of extracting lithium at a pilot plant in El Dorado and refining it into a 99.9% pure product at another test facility in Canada.

The 99.9% purity level, known as the “3 Nines” in the industry, is a significant achievement, Standard CEO Robert Mintak told Arkansas Business. 

“The challenge for the lithium industry is and will be to make lithium chemicals of the purity required not just for today’s market but for the future, when even higher-purity lithium chemicals will be required for longer-range higher energy density batteries,” Mintak said.

The $10 million El Dorado test plant has been producing a lithium chloride slurry since May, using the existing pipeline used by partner Lanxess AG to extract bromine from the underground saltwater for fire retardant manufacturing. The lithium chloride is being shipped to another Standard pilot plant in Richmond, British Columbia, which crystallizes the slurry into high-quality lithium carbonate.

It’s a wholly new method in lithium production, a $5 billion industry worldwide that previously relied on hard-rock mining in Australia or obtaining the element from vast evaporation pits, where brine is allowed to dry, often in South America and China.

“Lithium demand growth is driven by [electric vehicles], stationary energy storage and to a lesser degree by other products like smartphones, power tools, etc.,” Mintak said. “These products large and small use lithium-ion batteries.”

The company concentrates the El Dorado plant’s lithium chloride with an industry-standard reverse osmosis process, then converts it in Richmond into dried lithium carbonate through a proprietary technology the company calls SiFT.

Proving the SiFT process is a milestone toward “addressing next-generation battery requirements that the industry is not yet addressing,” Mintak said.

Standard’s scalable process is environmentally friendly, the company says, eliminating the use of evaporation ponds and reducing processing time from months to hours.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, which has shut down nonessential travel between Canada and the United States, Standard had planned to ship its SiFT pilot plant in modules from British Columbia to El Dorado. Instead, it was put together in Richmond for testing.

“When current pandemic-related restrictions are eased or lifted, it is still the company’s intention to relocate the SiFT plant to Arkansas so that it can be tied into the existing plant and operate on a continuous and integrated basis,” Standard Lithium said in a statement.

Andy Robinson, Standard’s president and COO, said in a news release this week that the company is proud of its accomplishment. “We’ve managed to demonstrate the first of its kind continuous extraction of lithium from Smackover brine and we’ve converted it into better than battery quality material. Not only that, but we’ve done it at a large scale, which now allows us to keep on working towards commercialisation. This proof of concept validates our approach over the past four years, and is testament to the hard work and ingenuity of our deep and diverse technical team.”

The company announced in September that it has begun planning a large-scale commercial plant in collaboration with Lanxess in El Dorado. It would be roughly the scale of a city water treatment plant and preliminary estimates put its capital costs at more than $400 million in U.S. dollars, Mintak said.

The CEO told Arkansas Business in September that several levels of securities law govern the company’s disclosures on the commercial plant’s costs, number of employees and other details, limiting his latitude in discussing the project. “We released a Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA), a technical report authored by the global engineering firm Worley Parsons in Q3 of 2019,” Mintak said in an email.

“That report considered a multi-phase build-out approach and target production of 20,900 tons of lithium carbonate that would be extracted and converted from the current tail brine flowing at the project.” The capital expenditure estimate for that was $437 million in U.S. dollars, and 100 direct jobs. “It did not include indirect jobs or the employment numbers during construction,” Mintak said.

“The project has the potential to grow significantly larger than just recovering lithium from the tail brine,” Mintak said. “Of course, a number of things need to happen to see that come into fruition such as project economics, performance, and demand continuing to grow as we expect it to. We have a number of hoops to get through before a final investment decision is made, and we are very careful in doing our best to under-promise and over-deliver as the lithium industry has seen a number of spectacular failures from groups that didn’t deliver on their promises.”